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Facebook launches NPM compatible client Yarn

As a large organization Facebook faces some unique challenges in scale of deploying code and so on. One pain point for the company was the slow performance of the de-facto standard packet manager for JavaScript, NPM. Unlike most of us, FB dev team stopped complaining and did something...

...which is a completely new packet manager for JavaScript. While at first this sounds like a fallacy, the fact is that it is compatible with both NPM and Bower repositories. This means that you can keep using the same packages and so on, it's just that the application you're using is now yarn, instead of the good-old npm:

Yarn is a new package manager that replaces the existing workflow for the npm client or other package managers while remaining compatible with the npm registry. It has the same feature set as existing workflows while operating faster, more securely, and more reliably.

This is a pragmatic solution to the problem that cost the corporation quite a bit of money and resources. While development of Yarn was not free, it will surely pay itself back in increased efficiently. Naturally Yarn is Open Source, so all of us can benefit from the work done by Facebook engineers. This is similar to other Open Source efforts from Facebook such as React, GraphQL and HHVM.